John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-63)

US president. Born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, of Irish Catholic descent, he was the son of Joseph Patrick Kennedy, a wealthy banker who had made money through investments and through illegal bootlegging during Prohibition.

John F Kennedy was educated at Harvard and the London School of Economics. Despite a deformed spine, and adrenal deficiency, he won an award for valour as commander of PT 109, a torpedo-boat sunk by the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II.

After the war, with the help of his father's money and newspaper contacts, he was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1946, but was mocked by colleagues as a dilettante playboy. In 1952, he was elected to the Senate. Corrective surgery to his spine caused him to miss the vote censuring Senator Joe McCarthy, the right-wing fanatic who had unleashed a witch-hunt against Communists in the early 1950s, and for whom his brother Robert had worked.

John Kennedy narrowly failed to get the 1956 Democratic nomination for vice- president. Four years later, in 1960, he was nominated for president. With an excellent campaign machine, and perhaps some undue assistance from Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, he defeated Richard Nixon in a close-run contest. His self-effacing wit, glamour and energy won him support from the younger generation – and he exploited his image as a war veteran and young father (he had married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953).

The youngest president, and the first to be a Roman Catholic, Kennedy was at first preoccupied with the Cold War, refusing to provide support for the Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and then surviving the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.

In 1963, he signed a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union and delivered a strongly anti-Communist speech in Berlin. During his presidency, American troops became more heavily involved in the Vietnam War.

In terms of domestic policies, he was less successful, although he did try to raise the minimum wage, promote public works and modify urban renewal programmes. Most of this was eclipsed by his public image as a friend of artists and celebrities, a stylish populist with a spirit of adventure.

The prospect of the re-election campaign in 1964 woke him up to the civil rights campaign and made him stress his liberal credentials. On 22 November 1963, John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, the result of a conspiracy whose exact nature remains a mystery.

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